Numlock News: July 7, 2025 • Wisdom, Dinosaurs, Hudson’s Bay Company
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Our longtime friends at Garbage Day are doing three live shows in July at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and I’m working on them. It’ll be a great time; more details at the bottom of the newsletter, and you should come! Tomorrow is the first one.
Dinosaurs
Jurassic World: Rebirth had a stellar opening weekend, making $147.3 million in its first five days domestically as well as another $171 million overseas, good for a $318 million opening. Audiences love seeing movies about dinosaurs, and are apparently willing to white knuckle it even through this script to get their fix. That said, the domestic opening as a three-day weekend is actually down compared to the three Jurassic World entries that preceded it, which may be of mild cause for concern for the future of the franchise.
Loot
Two Americans are facing possible charges in France in relation to a scheme selling gold bars from an 18th-century shipwreck and then selling them for bullion. The ship in question is Le Prince de Conty, which sank off the coast of Brittany in 1746, only to be discovered in 1974 in 10 to 15 meters of water. In 1975, the wreck was looted, with some gold bars inside stolen. In 2022, a diver named Yves Gladu confessed to stealing 16 gold bars from the ship over the course of 40 dives from 1976 to 1999 and once more in 2006. An American couple, Eleanor and Philip Courter, have been accused of selling these gold bars. Investigators concluded that the couple had been in possession of at least 23 gold bars in total and had sold 18 ingots for over $192,000.
Hudson’s Bay Company
Hudson’s Bay Company is a Canadian department store that is, thanks to a quirk of history, the oldest company in North America. It was formed in 1670 to exploit the fur trade in Canada. However, in March, the company announced it was bankrupt and was seeking creditor protection, which may bring an end to the firm’s historic run. That said, a company amasses a lot of stuff in a run like that; HBC has accumulated 1,700 works of art and 2,700 artifacts that a judge has allowed to be auctioned off in service of the debt. This has prompted protests from indigenous groups and a specific challenge from a representative of the 63 First Nations in the Manitoba province over the sale. Auctioning the art and artifacts would dissolve and scatter a collection that stands as a crucial singular archive.
Taylor C. Noakes, The Art Newspaper
HFPA
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is the group that began the Golden Globes, and the organization has been in a state of flux for the past several years. For years, the HFPA’s small membership held a solid grip on awards season, but a series of controversies in the early 2020s led the organization to not only cancel the Golden Globes for a year but also to overhaul the way that it operates. It cumulated in in Dick Clark Productions buying the Golden Globes and dissolving the group to reform as a for-profit LLC that oversees the awards. That year, the new owners offered the members either a $250,000 buyout or a $75,000 salary for five years (not a bad deal) only to renege and then cancel the salaries in February. This has sent the HFPA members up in arms, and last week, 55 of them voted to remove their organization’s president and seek to re-establish the organization under its original structure. Messy!
Cardiac Health
Heart attacks are becoming rarer and more survivable than they had been in years past. The proportion of all deaths attributable to heart attacks declined by 90 percent from 1970 to 2022, a period over which heart disease fell from causing 41 percent of adult deaths to just 24 percent. When hospitalized for a heart attack in 1970, a man over 65 had just a 60 percent chance of leaving the hospital alive; today, that’s about 90 percent. This is thanks to some broader societal shifts — for instance, the massive decline in smoking and the popularity and availability of statins to manage cholesterol — as well as the adoption of CPR and development of portable defibrillators.
Wisdom
Overall, 53 percent of Americans have had their wisdom teeth removed, but there’s an interesting generational shift at play here. Just 26 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 said that they have had their wisdom teeth removed, around half the general rate for respondents as a whole. Some of this is the natural way of things — younger people have had less time for wisdom teeth to emerge and potentially cause problems, for one — but something more complex may be at play. This trend could be reflecting a shifting scientific consensus on wisdom teeth removal that started in the early 2000s, questioning the need for routine wisdom tooth removal.
Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov
Champagne
The Baltic Sea is complicated to navigate, with thousands of small islands complicating matters and a generally shallow average depth of 180 feet. It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 ships have sunk there. While lots of those ships were carrying cargo from the rest of Europe, one type of cargo is of particular interest: champagne. In 1998, a team of Swedish divers found the Jönköping, a wreck bound for St. Petersburg that had been sunk in October 1916 and was carrying 3,000 bottles of 1907 Heidsieck & C ° Monopole Goût Américan. This champagne was pretty much all that survived the sinking and turned out to be exquisite. You can still buy a bottle of it for around $150,000.
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Wow. I feel as if I have known so many people who died of heart attacks (and I’m not THAT old). Crazy that that number is so much lower than it would have been!
"Two Americans are facing possible charges in France in relation to a scheme selling gold bars from an 18th-century shipwreck and then selling them for bullion."
Did you mean *stealing* gold bars?